Restroom Hand Dryers Blowing Feces

I actually prefer those high powered hand dryers over paper towels in the restrooms. I felt that if nothing was touching my hands, but air, it was probably the most sanitary way to dry my hands. A study shows this is definitely not the case and I'm grossed out over it. We are a pretty clean household and when we travel, we take all precautions. We carry wipes, we never touch a door handle directly and we always use the high powered hand dryers. We thought this was the cleanest way to dry our hands. Boy were we wrong.

According to a Yahoo! article, a study was done testing public restrooms with high powered hand dryers to see how much bacteria is in the air. The study tested thirty six restrooms with open toilets (no lids). The hand dryers use the air within the restroom, suck it through and then forcefully shoot the air onto your hands and, in turn, dry them. They discovered that because of the lidless toilets and the constant flushing, bacteria including feces was let off into the air and then being sucked into the hand dryers.

Therefore, they determined that the forced air that is blown onto your hands is really blowing feces and other bacteria from inside the restroom onto your "clean" hands.

Researchers say that the cleanest way to dry your hands is by using paper towels.